A group at University of Memphis is releasing photos of individuals posing as prominent black icons in celebration of Black History Month.
The students will be releasing these photos from their Instagram page, @tigersinhistory, every day to help educate their viewers on the importance of black leaders, according to senior senator Prataj Ingram.
“Right now we are piloting,” Ingram said. “February is the pilot month. We’re dropping a picture every single day because it is black history, and from there we’re going to gather our responses and see the support that we have.”
Sedrick Askew, a U of M graduate and photographer for Impact Lyfe, will be taking the photographs, with the help of some current students, in order to introduce “tigersinhistory” to the campus.
Once the collection is completed, Askew plans to auction off a literature book compiled of each image and donate the money to The Academy of Memphis, a nonprofit organization.
“Social media is the way we are promoting it and pubbing it,” senior Jaylon Wallace said. “It was a last minute idea that came to me, so it was a ‘Take this and roll with it and see where we can go with it.’”
This is not something they were instructed by the University to do, Ingram said. This was all Wallace’s idea. They were just able to direct it and raise interest among students.
The person photographed chooses which black icon in history they want to portray, then are interviewed about their person of choice, Ingram said.
“We ask them why they picked this person, and what they did for history,” Ingram said.
Stacia Coleman, assistant photographer, said they are trying to produce something to which everyone can relate.
“We’re trying to embody the person,” Coleman said. “We really want to get them into it. We’re trying to get the picture – recreate it into our time, so we can tell our story.”
The students are using social media to wake people up and show that history is always happening.
“History doesn’t just happen in February,” Wallace said. “We don’t just talk about it in February, we talk about it forever. History builds on top of itself, and we want it to continue to grow and get better and better.”
“I love it,” Coleman said. “I already had some people walk up to me saying, ‘We want to be Saltn-Peppa,’ and then we’re going to bring out more fun characters such as Will Smith and Jazzy J. We don’t want it to be hardcore; we have fun in our history as well.”
Coleman said they want to create their own trend with black history.
“We don’t have just one group of people; we are representing everybody,” Coleman said. “We have people like athletes, Greeks, non-Greeks and everybody that we see everyday.”
Wallace wants students to know that history not only includes events that happened in the past, but it also occurs every day.
“We are the history itself, everything we do is part of history, especially when we are doing something positive,” he said.
